Was Jesus A Religious Liberal?

Sermon by Stephen D. Edington, March 28, 1999

When friends or relatives from other parts of the country ask me what the winter has been like in New England this year, my reply is that we were doing fine until we got to the month of March. Between our having a Sunday service snowed out and my having a lingering bout with the flu--which I'm completely over now--I'm glad this month is down to its last few days. One of the ways I've coped with the last several weeks, however, has been to plan part of my summer--a nice little diversion, I must say. More specifically, I registered for one of the summer intensive courses being offered in a continuing education series for ministers at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. The GTU is a consortium of mostly mainline Protestant seminaries in Berkeley, with our own UU Starr King School for the Ministry as a member institution. I learned about the GTU's summer program when I was at the Starr King School on sabbatical a couple of years ago; and was impressed enough by it that I decided I'd like to go back and take a course sometime-- which I will for a week this July. The course I'm taking is one on contemporary religious humanism, and is being led by a retired UU minister, the Rev. Khoren Arisian. Khoren's writings have been very helpful to me during my time in the UU ministry, and I'm looking forward to the opportunity to study with him.

But its another course offering in this summer series that I almost signed up for instead that I'll mention as a way of introducing my topic for today. It is called "Saving Jesus From Those Who Are Right," and is being led by the Rev. Dr. Carter Heyward, an Episcopal feminist theologian. I've found much of her work to be very insightful. Dr. Heyward gave a well received presentation at one of our recent UU General Assemblies. Her title is pretty self-explanatory really. It addresses an increasing concern on the part of mainline Protestants--and Catholics, too, I would imagine--that the person of Jesus is being co-opted, as they see it, by the religious right in service of a reactionary political agenda, and needs to be re-claimed by more moderate to liberal Christians.

I saw an example of the concern Rev. Heyward's seminar is addressing back last June when, with several other members of our congregation, I took part in the Gay Pride Day parade up in Manchester. It was a very festive occasion, as those of you who were there may recall. But stationed along the parade route were a number of members of some the Christian fundamentalist churches in our area who were protesting the underlying message and theme of the parade and rally--which, of course, they had a right to do. I guess they also had a right to be dishonest in their representation of Christianity because they were certainly doing that. About every half block someone was yelling--and I do mean yelling--at us to turn from our sins and turn to Jesus; that Jesus wanted to help us out of our condition [the assumption being, I guess, that we were all gay]; and that our presence was somehow an affront to Jesus.

Now here's what I mean by their being dishonest. At no place in the entire New Testament does Jesus, the founder of the religion these folk were purporting to represent, even mention homosexuality. He is, however, portrayed as one who was very quick to condemn what he saw as the ills and evil doings of his day. Jesus' condemnations were largely aimed at religious hypocrisy (as in "woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites"), at the treatment of the underclass in the society in which he lived, at the exploitation of the poor, at the lack of compassion for the needy and mistreated, and the like. Given his proclivity for issuing condemnations, had Jesus felt that homosexuality was some kind of social or personal sin he would have surely said so. The so-called "biblical injunctions" against homosexuality are really found in a few obscure Old Testament verses, and at a couple of points in the New Testament writings of St. Paul--who had some very serious hang-ups with anything having to do with "the flesh" anyway. Paul appears to have been pretty much repulsed by sex in general, regardless of the orientation. So as I walked along the street there in Manchester last June I thought, "Should I go over and point all this out to some of the more vocal of these individuals?" Nah... I figured it would just encourage more yelling.

I know it is painful for some of my liberal Christian friends--and for some of my colleagues in mainline Protestant ministries--to see the person of Jesus misused and exploited in this, and in many other, ways. This is one of several reasons that the Interfaith Alliance was formed. It is why I think Dr. Heyward will get a good response to her course offering this summer. It is also easy for us Unitarian Universalists to say, "Well, the co-option of Jesus is really moderate/liberal Christian problem, since Jesus doesn't have that much to do with us anyway."

But such an attitude would be dishonest on our part, I feel. We're talking about an historically obscure figure here who, at the same time, probably has the greatest name recognition in the Western--and much of the Eastern--world. He has inspired countless works of art and music. The religion that came into being in his name now commands over a billion followers world wide; and whatever our personal beliefs may be, we live in a culture where that religion remains the predominant one. The 3rd millennium, whose arrival we will herald in just over nine months now, is calculated from the time of Jesus' birth--granted that its off by a few years. Within our own Unitarian Universalist community liberal Christianity is named as one of the six sources of our living tradition; as one of the many religious or spiritual paths one may take to our UU principles and values. Those of you who have taken the "UU 101" course--and many of you who haven't--know that our denominational origins are within liberal Christianity. This is why I devote a sermon each year--at the beginning of the Christian Holy Week--to the life, and to what I regard as the meaning of the life, of Jesus of Nazareth; the one whom our Christian sisters and brothers also call Jesus the Christ.

The title I'm going with this year is "Was Jesus A Religious Liberal?" In so doing, I could be setting myself up for the same charge I just leveled against those on the Christian right, namely that I'm out to create a Jesus figure that caters to my own biases. I'm a religious liberal, and, therefore, so was Jesus. Indeed, it was Dr. Albert Schweitzer himself who cautioned in his book The Quest for the Historical Jesus, that seeking the Jesus of History is somewhat akin to looking down a well. What the seeker may end up finding is his or her reflection in the water at the bottom of the well. In addition, since Jesus--as Schweitzer learned in the course of his own quest--cannot be specifically identified as an historical figure anyway, then its not possible to definitively say what kind of person he was--liberal, conservative, or otherwise. It is virutualy impossible as well to determine what those categories may have even meant in his day. That said, I do believe it is possible to find contained within the portrait of Jesus that the New Testament gospels offer a model for religious liberals, even as our Unitarian and Universalist forebears did. So, let me work from there.

I use the term "portrait" because that is what the New Testament offers us when it comes to Jesus; a figure as seen through the eyes of those who were portraying him. Now, that can rightfully be said of any historian or biographer. The account they offer of a life or of an historical era is filtered through their own human biases. There is no such thing as purely objective history or biography so long as its human beings who are telling the story. But with the story of Jesus it is even more complicated than that. What the New Testatment gives us is a man whose human identity is covered by a mask or veil placed over him by those telling the story. The authors of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not biographers; they were theologians of the first and second century church. They were essentially writing religious tracts to establish that the founder of their fledging religion--which was not even called "Christianity" at the time of their writing--was indeed the Messiah, the Son of God, the one come to establish God's Kingdom or reign on earth. There was nothing deliberately sinister about this on the part of the Gospel writers, by the way. They were writing in concert with their beliefs. But it still leaves us with a veil.

Suppose, by way of a comparative example, the first written accounts of the life of Socrates had been drawn up by persons who were firmly committed to the belief that Socrates was the full incarnation of a Greek god; and that his mission on Earth was teach us the ways of the gods. Suppose further that his execution via hemlock came to be regarded as an act taken to atone for the sins of humanity. This would not necessarily make the entire accounts of Socrates' life out and out falsehoods; it would mean that the person of Socrates was covered by a theological veil.

This did not happen with Socrates, of course. Although the first accounts of his life no doubt contained the biases of those doing the telling, he was never presented as anything other than human. But that did not happen with Jesus, and so we have the veil to which I've referred. This does not mean that the gospels are lies with respect to the life of Jesus, but it does make them rather strong theological filters. Such being the case, there are two basic approaches one can take to the life of Jesus.

One is to deal with the veil or mask itself; accept it, find meaning in it, and build one's religious faith around it should one so choose. This approach still allows for a good deal of diversity of thought within Christianity about what the gospel writers actually meant when they wrote what they did. It is why there is such a wide range of thought and practice with the Christian faith from fundamentalist to moderate to liberal to radical. It reflects the different ways of interpreting the veil. The fundamentalist, of course, would insist that there really is no veil; that what you get in the New Testament is the straight, inerrant, historical skinny--which raises a whole host of other questions that I don't care to pursue here, anymore than I cared to pursue the hecklers in the Gay Pride parade last June. More mainstream Christians, however, will acknowledge that the veil is there and that they're trying to understand and relate to it as best they can. When such acknowledgement given I have every respect for their position and for their search.

The other approach is to attempt to get at who, or what is behind the veil; to try and find the living, breathing human being behind the mask. Such attempts can never be fully successful because no "primary sources" about Jesus actually exist. We've already heard Dr. Schweitzer's warning about what the result could well be when one makes such a search. But that hasn't stopped the attempts from being made. In fact, it was our liberal religious forebears, our Unitarian and Universalist spiritual ancestors, who were foremost among those who looking to see behind the curtain. The "foremost of the foremost" in this respect was Thomas Jefferson who wrote his own version of the New Testament gospels by editing out all references or suggestions that Jesus was a divine being--attempting, that is, to render him completely human. While this work is generally referred to as "The Jefferson Bible," Mr. Jefferson himself was a bit more modest. The actual title he affixed to his effort was The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.

Jefferson, and some of the other Unitarians and Universalists of his day did indeed believe that Jesus was a religious liberal. They were not out to deny or diminish the Christian faith--they regarded themselves as Christians, after all. They were seeking what they called "pure Christianity" or "practical Christianity." They believed that if you could strip away all the dogma and all the mythology that later came to surround this itinerant Jewish teacher you would find the kind of Christianity they were espousing. Behind the doctrinal mask or veil they believed you would find Jesus to be an enlightened and humane individual who, while speaking and acting within the context of his own religion. He was demonstrating with his own life timeless truths about human beings and human life. This, it must be admitted, was pretty much the way our UU ancestors saw themselves; and what they aspired towards.

Does this mean that Jefferson and our other liberal religious forebears were simply looking down Dr. Schweitzer's well? They were in part, but not entirely. The distinction these religious liberals made between the "religion of Jesus" and the "religion about Jesus" is still a viable one I believe. The religion about Jesus is the one that was more or less projected onto his life by St. Paul; and by the debates among early church theologians which culminated in the Council of Nicea in 325, when the official Christian doctrine was hammered out and formalized in the words of the Nicene Creed. The religion of Jesus--that is to say the religion this hidden and enigmatic figure actually believed and taught and tried to live his life by--is somewhere in the New Testament gospels. It is interwoven among the tapestry of the stories and legends that came to be told about this individual, and is found enmeshed within the theologies that came to embellish his life.

Looking at, and through, this tapestry I can see some hints of the principles and values we here seek to affirm and promote. I see someone who deliberately chose to take his message of what he called "the love of my Father in heaven" to those who were on the bottom rung of the latter of the society in which he lived. Jesus appears to be someone who brought his messages of hope and his acts of healing to those who were generally shunned by what we today would call mainstream culture. He may not have used our kind of language, but his appears to be a life that could touch the "inherent worth and dignity" of persons--all persons; and a life that often demanded "justice, equity, and compassion in human relations."

Jesus appears to be something of a conservative--especially in the book of Matthew--by calling for close adherence to, and respect for, his own Jewish tradition and faith. But he also comes off as a religious radical by constantly challenging the religious authorities and the religious establishment of his day to apply the dictates of their religion to "the least of these, my brethren." It was apparently his confronting of this religious establishment and authority that eventually got him put to death as he came to be seen as too big of a threat to those in power. The Palm Sunday legend is that it was the fear of a popular uprising instigated by Jesus that caused him to be permanently removed by the political and religious leaders of his time and place.

While I do not accept the doctrine of the atonement that was later used to explain Jesus' death, I can certainly admire the courage of the convictions of this obscure individual, and marvel at how he has left his mark on our civilization. So, while we cannot sort out the life from the legend because the tapestry is too tight to permit it, I believe it is possible to discern in the New Testament accounts a human being urging his followers, in the language of the religion of his day, to live out their humanity to the fullest: "Your faith" he told them, "will make you whole."

As many of you have heard me relate, perhaps ad nauseum by now, my own religious journey has been one from an almost-fundamentalist type of Christianity to religious humanism. Needless to say, my understanding of the person of Jesus has gone through a number metamorphoses in the course of that journey. While no longer central or focal to my religious and spiritual outlook the portrait of Jesus, and the narrative tapestry within which his life is contained, maintains something of a hold on me nonetheless. In my, and our, ongoing quest and efforts to create an inclusive liberal religious community here, I want us to welcome and validate those who find some of their cues for living in the life and deeds of this hidden but intriguing individual.

This, now, in closing: One of the more insightful comments I've heard about the person of Jesus from a contemporary UU is found in Rev. Jack Mendelsohn's book Being Liberal in and Illiberal Age. (You may have heard me cite this before, if so I ask your indulgence) Rev. Mendelsohn, now in retirement, writes, "To me, the important thing about Jesus is not that he was just human (as he was), but that the human race is capable of producing him. And not him alone, but others like him. And not only in ancient times, but now." Knowing Jack as I do, I know that neither he nor I believe that the person of Jesus was made up out of whole cloth by the first century church--embellished a good deal, yes, but not made up. But what Rev. Mendelsohn is saying here is that even it that were so, it still would be a good and hopeful thing. He finds hope in the fact that we human beings are capable of imagining someone who lived the kind of life that Jesus lived--whoever he really was. Such imaginings mean that we have contained within our minds and hearts and souls the ability to conceive of good and worthy and noble and holy human things for ourselves to aspire towards.

Jack's words are also reflective of the message of our closing hymn, "It Sounds Along the Ages". Throughout human history there has been a Voice, an Urging, that has called us to deeper levels of justice, that has called us to become more than we are, that has called us to seek those truths that make us free, that has called us to reach out to our wider human family, and to care for our planet Earth. This Voice has taken the form of many voices in many different times and in many different places--and yet they each and all call us to a common humanity. This morning we have looked at the source of one single voice and one single life that represented a single expression of this larger Voice and larger Life. However its call come to us, may we have the courage to heed it.

Copyright © 1999 by the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Nashua NH. All rights reserved.